CFP - Special Issue Journal of Early Modern Studies: Gardens as Laboratories. The History of Botany through the History of Gardens
Special Issue for: Journal of Early Modern
Studies (ZetaBooks), vol. 6/1 (Spring, 2017)
Title of the volume: Gardens as
Laboratories. The History of Botany through the History of Gardens
Deadline: October 1, 2016
CFP: After having undergone the undeserved
condition of third excluded during the Middle Ages, the studies of flora
experienced a new crucial consideration during the Renaissance, when
the discovery of the New World brought in Europe an amount of new items
(and especially anomalies and ambiguities), which undermined the accepted
systematization of nature. Along the development of a crisis in the
traditional systems of classifications, a new effort in collecting
and disseminating knowledge flourished, resulting in a few important
cultural achievements. Botanical practices developed as a central subject
through both the request of collecting and the reproduction of plants,
ultimately contributing in the epistemological ferments of the
Renaissance and early modernity for reconstructing the ontological
frontiers of nature under a new light – and sometimes reorganizing nature
from a vegetal point of view, or using plants as literary model to portray
human societies.
The goal of this volume is to delve into the
status of botanical experiences through a number of papers focusing on the
effort in collecting, gardening, and achieving botanical research, a set
of practices involving a wide range of men and women – botanists, natural
philosophers, literate, collectors, directors of gardens, erudite, book
publishers, and travelers – drawing attention to vegetal items and making
vegetation an ideal term of naturalistic knowledge.
The volume is open to both re-elaborated
papers presented at the International Conference Manipulating Flora, and
to anyone else who wants to submit unpublished works on this topic.
Please, contact the invited editors, Fabrizio
Baldassarri (fabrizio.baldassarri@gmail.
Publishing steps: Papers must be submitted by
October 1, 2016, and will be sent to two double-blind peer-reviewers; referee’s
comments are due by December 1, 2016; the final submission is due
by January 31, 2017. The edited volume will be published by March 2017.
General information and norms: Papers must be
around 8000 words in length (notes included), with an abstract of
500 words maximum, and 5 keywords. Images can be published (b/w), with a
minimum resolution of 300 dpi. All images must have a valid copyright. For
each image added, please consider to remove 500 words from your paper.